Here is a document the USDA doesn’t want you to see. It’s what the agency calls a ‘technical review’-nothing more than a USDA-contracted researcher’s simple, blunt summary of recent academic findings on the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant infections and their link with factory animal farms. The topic is a serious one. A single antibiotic-resistant pathogen, MRSA-just one of many now circulating among Americans-now claims more lives each year than AIDS.

Back in June, the USDA put the review up on its National Agricultural Library website. Soon after, a Dow Jones story quoted a USDA official who declared it to be based on ‘reputed, scientific, peer-reviewed, and scholarly journals.’ She added that the report should not be seen as a ‘representation of the official position of USDA.’ That’s fair enough-the review was designed to sum up the state of science on antibiotic resistance and factory farms, not the USDA’s position on the matter.

But around the same time, the agency added an odd disclaimer to the top of the document: ‘This review has not been peer reviewed. The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Department of Agriculture.’ And last Friday, the document (original link) […]

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NEW YORK — On a Sunday morning in late May, Taylor left her Harlem apartment and boarded a train for Greenwich, Conn. She planned on spending the day with a man she had met online, but not in person.

Taylor, a 22-year-old student at Hunter College, had confided in her roommate about the trip and they agreed to swap text messages during the day to make sure she was safe.

Once in Greenwich, a man who appeared significantly older than his advertised age of 42 greeted Taylor at the train station and then drove her to the largest house she had ever seen. He changed into his swimming trunks, she put on a skimpy bathing suit, and then, by the side of his pool, she rubbed sunscreen into the folds of his sagging back — bracing herself to endure an afternoon of sex with someone she suspected was actually about 30 years her senior.

Taylor doubted that her client could relate to someone who had grown up black and poor in the South Bronx. While he summered on Martha’s Vineyard, she’d likely pass another July and August working retail in Times Square.

A love match it wasn’t. But then again, this was no ordinary […]

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REYKJAVIK – A group of 25 ordinary citizens on Friday presented to Iceland’s parliamentary speaker a new constitution draft, which they compiled with the help of hundreds of others who chipped in online.

The group had been working on the draft since April and posted its work on the Internet, allowing hundreds of other citizens to give their feedback on the project via the committee’s website and on social networks such as Facebook.

‘The reaction from the public was very important. And many of the members were incredibly active in responding to the comment that came through,’ Salvor Nordal, the head of the elected committee of citizens from all walks of life, told reporters.

Katrin Oddsdottir, a lawyer who had shared her experience on the committee through micro-blogging site Twitter, said she believed the public’s input was ‘what mattered the most’ in preparing the draft.

‘What I learned is that people can be trusted. We put all our things online and attempted to read, listen and understand and I think that made the biggest difference in our job and made our work so so so much better,’ she said.

Iceland’s constitution was barely adapted from Denmark’s when the island nation gained independence from the Scandinavian […]

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What will happen if the Texas drought goes on for another two years?

I live in Budha, Texas, a very typical rural Texas town of less than 2500. What I am describing is taking place within about a 10 mile radius of my house. Ten iddy biddy miles. Expand this out to all of Texas…..

One of the great mystery questions in life is ‘what happens to birds when they die, and why don’t we ever see them?’ – Birds are falling out dead from the trees. Just, plunk, a dead bird.

How many vultures do you usually see around road kill? Four, five, six? Try 30. Thirty birds vying for any kind of moisture from a dead thing, any kind of nourishment.

Last week 100 cattle dropped dead in the field, pretty much all at once. The fire department was called to water down the rest of the herd, trying to save it.

There is no hay, no food, no grass, no insects, no standing water for breeding mosquitos, no mosquitos – in Texas!, nothing to eat. The bats are in peril.

Every morning around 9:00am I go out and water my birds. I take a long hose, put the hand sprinkler on ‘jet’ and […]

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Does the expiration date on a bottle of a medication mean anything? If a bottle of Tylenol, for example, says something like ‘Do not use after June 1998,’ and it is August 2002, should you take the Tylenol? Should you discard it? Can you get hurt if you take it? Will it simply have lost its potency and do you no good?

In other words, are drug manufacturers being honest with us when they put an expiration date on their medications, or is the practice of dating just another drug industry scam, to get us to buy new medications when the old ones that purportedly have ‘expired’ are still perfectly good?

These are the pressing questions I investigated after my mother-in-law recently said to me, ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ when I pointed out that the Tylenol she was about to take had ‘expired’ 4 years and a few months ago. I was a bit mocking in my pronouncement — feeling superior that I had noticed the chemical corpse in her cabinet — but she was equally adamant in her reply, and is generally very sage about medical issues.

So I gave her a glass of water with the purportedly ‘dead’ drug, of which […]

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